Medicine: For Man & Dog

Only 52 people, on an average, die in the U.S. each year from rabies, but almost everyone has a chilling fear of the disease, and with good reason: once it takes hold, it invariably ends in a horrible sequence of delirium, paralysis and death. The only way to save a patient bitten by a rabid animal is to give him a prompt injection of vaccine which kills the disease before it is fully developed.

But the treatment is chancy, too. About 100,000 people get the vaccine each year (as a precaution, in most cases). How many die from it—because of inflammation of the brain and spinal cord—no one knows; the U.S. Public Health Service believes that it kills almost as many as are killed by rabies. Doctors have a grave responsibility in deciding whether to use the vaccine.

After three years of painstaking experiments to remove the fatal factor from the vaccine, PHS’s Dr. J. Frederick Bell believes that he has succeeded. With a team of researchers, he has produced a vaccine without the paralytic factor, which is still effective against rabies in guinea pigs. Vaccine producers throughout the country are testing the process, getting ready to use it in making human vaccine.

Dr. Bell had not identified the paralytic factor when he found a way to get rid of it. All he knew was that it was contained in the brain tissue of animals (usually rabbits) from which the vaccine is made. The trick was to dissolve the brain tissue without killing the factor which prevents rabies. His years of work led to a tedious, complicated process in which the infected brain tissue is repeatedly dissolved, chilled, suspended, centrifuged and filtered until a “washed vaccine,” untainted by the paralytic factor, is left.

If the purified vaccine proves as satisfactory as expected, it will also be good news for man’s best friend. Dogs being immunized against rabies (many now get an injection every year) have been the dangerous vaccine’s most numerous victims.